I have never written a review before but my experience at Ember was so appalling that I feel obligated to write one. The first red flag presented itself when I sat down at the table and my hand landed in a slimy substance. You would hope a restaurant would thoroughly clean each table between customers, but I guess not. We then ordered drinks. My cousin ordered a Manhattan, and I ordered a “Top Shelf Old Fashioned” (it’s just called that on the menu.) The drinks tasted as if the bartender had never made a cocktail before. There was zero sweetness to them, so I had to squeeze out every bit of juice from my orange wedge just to balance the drink somewhat. My cousin’s Manhattan was basically straight bourbon in a martini glass, so he ordered an additional lemonade with which to mix it. I have consumed less-than-stellar drinks before and hoped the rest of the meal would be better. I was wrong.

Once our server returned, we ordered wings and nachos for our appetizers. We’ve had their wings before, which are actually pretty good (credit where it’s due), but I could have made better nachos with three ingredients and my microwave. The cheese was not layered whatsoever and there were about four beans localized to one corner of the tray. The salsa, sour cream, and guacamole were presented alongside the chips in their own individual plastic containers, so the $14 “nachos” were basically chips, one thin layer of melted cheese, four beans, and a few pieces of sliced jalapeño. We considered sending the chips back but were so hungry that we ate them anyway.

Now for the coup de grâce: the pizzas. We ordered a custom veggie pizza with pesto, mozzarella, onions, mushrooms, and arugula as well as a pizza from the menu with sausage and broccoli rabe. The veggie pizza came out first, and we immediately noticed it was undercooked. The bottom had no char on it, which is surprising considering the restaurant advertises its 1,000-degree pizza oven. We kindly asked our server to tell the cook to put it back in the oven, which she had no problem doing. Our server then brought back the improved veggie pizza (though they had forgotten to include the arugula) plus the sausage pizza, which was piled high with minced sausage and broccoli rabe stems. You would think that since we asked for the veggie pizza to spend more time in the oven that the sausage pizza would be cooked more thoroughly, but you would be wrong. Since there was so much minced sausage and rabe on the pizza (the opposite problem the nachos had, ironically), we could not tell it was underdone. The sausage pizza was not only undercooked but had a palpable chemical taste. When I asked one of my other cousins who was eating something else to try it, he wanted to spit it out and remarked that it tasted like paint. At this point, we just wanted to leave the restaurant so we asked for the check.

The first issue we noticed on the check was that it included a “Delivery Fee.” Seeing as though we were eating 20 feet away from the kitchen and were already unhappy with the meal, one of us got up to ask what this fee is about. One of the employees told us this was an additional fee the restaurant imposes upon their customers when they pay with a credit card, which, of course, they did not tell us about before paying. Additionally, they had charged us for the arugula on the veggie pizza even though it wasn’t included on it. Since the restaurant had already run my credit card, we decided it was too late to complain about this relatively minor detail, and we stood up and left.

Last but not least, I began to experience a piercing stomach ache immediately when I got home. I am certain it was due to the paint-flavored sausage pizza that I suspect was not cooked to temperature. In the end, we paid over $200 for slimy garlic butter hands, insultingly bad nachos, decent wings, and inedible pizza.